By Roni Caryn Rabin
When my mother, Pauline, was 70, she lost her sense of balance. She started walking with an odd shuffling gait, taking short steps and barely lifting her feet off the ground. She often took my hand, holding it and squeezing my fingers.
Her decline was precipitous. She fell repeatedly. She stopped driving, and she could no longer ride her bike in a straight line along the C&O Canal. The woman who taught me the sidestroke couldn’t even stand in the shallow end of the pool. “I feel like I’m drowning,” she’d say.
A retired psychiatrist, my mother had numerous advantages — education, resources and insurance — but, still, getting the right diagnosis took nearly 10 years. Each expert saw the problem through the narrow prism of a single specialty. Surgeons recommended surgery. Neurologists screened for common incurable conditions. The answer was under their noses, in my mother’s hunches and her family history. But it took a long time before someone connected the dots.
My mother was using a walker by the time she was told she had a rare condition that causes gait problems and cognitive loss, and is one of the few treatable forms of dementia.
The bad news was that it had taken so long to get the diagnosis that some of the damage might not be reversible.
“This should be one of the first things physicians look for in an older person,” my mother said recently. “You can actually do something about it.”

By Neuroskeptic
In an interesting short paper just published in Trends in Cognitive Science, Caltech neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs offers his thoughts on The Unsolved Problems of Neuroscience.
Here’s Adolphs’ list of the top 23 questions (including 3 “meta” issues), which, he says, was inspired by Hilbert’s famous set of 23 mathematical problems:
Problems that are solved, or soon will be:
I. How do single neurons compute?
II. What is the connectome of a small nervous system, like that of Caenorhabitis elegans (300 neurons)?
III. How can we image a live brain of 100,000 neurons at cellular and millisecond resolution?
IV. How does sensory transduction work?
Problems that we should be able to solve in the next 50 years:
V. How do circuits of neurons compute?
VI. What is the complete connectome of the mouse brain (70,000,000 neurons)?
VII. How can we image a live mouse brain at cellular and millisecond resolution?
VIII. What causes psychiatric and neurological illness?
IX. How do learning and memory work?
X. Why do we sleep and dream?
XI. How do we make decisions?
XII. How does the brain represent abstract ideas?
Problems that we should be able to solve, but who knows when:
XIII. How does the mouse brain compute?
XIV. What is the complete connectome of the human brain (80,000,000,000 neurons)?
XV. How can we image a live human brain at cellular and millisecond resolution?
XVI. How could we cure psychiatric and neurological diseases?
XVII. How could we make everybody’s brain function best?
Problems we may never solve:
XVIII. How does the human brain compute?
XIX. How can cognition be so flexible and generative?
XX. How and why does conscious experience arise?
Meta-questions:
XXI. What counts as an explanation of how the brain works? (and which disciplines would be needed to provide it?)
XXII. How could we build a brain? (how do evolution and development do it?)
XXIII. What are the different ways of understanding the brain? (what is function, algorithm, implementation?)
Adolphs R (2015). The unsolved problems of neuroscience. Trends in cognitive sciences PMID: 25703689

Distinct changes in the immune systems of patients with ME or chronic fatigue syndrome have been found, say scientists.
Increased levels of immune molecules called cytokines were found in people during the early stages of the disease, a Columbia University study reported.
It said the findings could help improve diagnosis and treatments.
UK experts said further refined research was now needed to confirm the results.
People with ME (myalgic encephalopathy) or CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) suffer from exhaustion that affects everyday life and does not go away with sleep or rest.
They can also have muscle pain and difficulty concentrating.
ME can also cause long-term illness and disability, although many people improve over time.
It is estimated that around 250,000 people in the UK have the disease.
Disease pattern
The US research team, who published their findings in the journal Science Advances, tested blood samples from nearly 300 ME patients and around 350 healthy people.
They found specific patterns of immune molecules in patients who had the disease for up to three years.
These patients had higher levels of of cytokines, particularly one called interferon gamma, which has been linked to the fatigue that follows many viral infections.
Healthy patients and those who had the disease for longer than three years did not show the same pattern.
Lead author Dr Mady Hornig said this was down to the way viral infections could disrupt the immune system.
"It appears that ME/CFS patients are flush with cytokines until around the three-year mark, at which point the immune system shows evidence of exhaustion and cytokine levels drop."